Is the War on Terror a War on Truth? - EssayNovember 1
Is the War on Terror a War on Truth?
Placing the Deceit and Media Cover Ups of the Cheney-Bush Regime in the Context of History and Contemporary Politics
by Anthony J. Hall
Founding Coordinator of Globalization Studies
1 November, 2006
updated 22 November
Weapons of Mass Destruction may have been finally discovered in Iraq. The recorded image of a brilliant nighttime flash briefly lighting up Baghdad?Äôs entire urban landscape has set some districts of the internet?Äôs digital blogosphere abuzz with rumors and theories. The flash was one element of a raging inferno that developed after the major US weapons arsenal in Iraq was hit by hostile fire. In my opinion the lack of high-profile analysis and commentary about the significance of this devastating attack signals bad news concerning the deep involvement of the commercial media in the culture of lies and deceit that has seemingly become synonymous with the so-called War on Terror. The attack on the arsenal began on the night of October 10th. The anti-US strike effectively set a torch to the cornucopia of high-tech weaponry and combat vehicles stored at the core of Forward Operating Base Falcon in southern Baghdad. FOB Falcon is known to the local Iraqi population as Al-Saqr.
The US government immediately announced there were no casualties resulting from the series of massive explosions accompanying the thirteen hour fire over an area said to encompass about eight city blocks. Then many alternative accounts began to emerge on the internet fuelled largely by the availability of two archived videos that left no doubt about the huge magnitude of the event. Some of these web reports include a list of the precise names, ranks, and assignments of about 300 individuals alleged to be US casualties. Other anti-US reports point to 122 deaths and 90 injuries of ?ÄúIraqi puppet forces.?Äù The precise source of the list of US dead and injured is not clearly identified beyond a reference to the US military hospital at al-Habbaniyah and an article by Brian Harring referring to media reports from the news service, Ashraf Al-Iraqi. One of the web sites carrying the list emanates from a Vancouver-based operation known as Jihad Unspun. According to an article published on the web by informationclearinghouse, Jihad Unspun is suspected of being a front to facilitate CIA-backed political-psychological operations.
The lack of any official acknowledgment of the magnitude of the episode has opened the door to all manner of conjecture about what is really going on. Much of the conjecture revolves around a four-minute news broadcast originally presented live on Iraqi television. The television report has been archived for downloading on You Tube and a number of other sites. The broadcast records a blast so large that it bathed the entire urban landscape of greater Baghdad with a brilliant shot of illumination. Then a mushroom-shaped cloud took clear shape over the site of the detonation. Debate in the blogosphere became heated over whether or not the blast was that of a low-capacity tactical nuclear weapon such as the W54. The Smirking Chimp web site reported on October 21 that the video recording of the massive explosion ?Äúwas posted by an Iraqi news service.?Äù This news service is said to have been subsequently ?Äúraided and many journalists there killed the next day.?Äù On October 28 the web site, ?ÄúPissed On Politics,?Äù connected the explosion to a discussion televised on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. In that discussion journalist Mark Shields told anchorman Jim Lehr that a top US Military Officer is recommending that all US troops should be removed as soon as possible from Baghdad. The web commentary concerning the PBS discussion referred to explosions of ?Äúdepleted uranium,?Äù a ?Äúgargantuan radioactive mess?Äù and a ?Äúuranium munitions fire.?Äù One commentator made reference to twenty-one different kinds of projectiles in the US arsenal that are filled with highly radioactive depleted uranium. Another blogger speculated that if the radioactive contamination of Baghdad proved substantial it could ?Äúruin the American government.?Äù The speculation extended to questions about whether FOB Falcon was storing weapons that were slated to be deployed in some future US attack on Iran.
What does it say about the apparent success of the US government in muzzling the commercial media when the only serious public discussion about the magnitude, public health considerations, and geopolitical significance of this bull?Äôs eye targeting of what was, perhaps, the most strategic US military installation in all of Iraq, is relegated to the internet? Was the apparent cover up connected to the imminence of the mid-term elections on November 7th? If a cover up of this magnitude was successfully engineered in the name of the War on Terror, what other information of vital importance to the health of our democracies is being hidden from our view? How much of the supposed information on the War on Terror presented to us through the vehicle of the commercial media is, in fact, carefully orchestrated disinformation? Who is directly responsible for, or complicit in, the lying and censorship preventing full public disclosure of the international crimes which are seemingly integral to the waging of the so-called War on Terror? Will the dominance in Congress after the Democratic Party?Äôs victory in the mid-term elections begin the process of bringing to light the lies and deceit done in the name of the so-called War on Terror.
The conception of the War on Terror as a War on Truth permeates Frank Rich?Äôs recent volume. It is entitled The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. Rich comments regularly on US politics in op ed pieces in The New York Times. The fact that Rich was formerly a theatre critic speaks eloquently about the evolution of statecraft in the superpower into an extension of show business. Rich describes as a ?Äúcatastrophe?Äù the assault on truth by the Bush regime and the US news media dominated by the corporate leviathans of info-entertainment like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner. Rich concludes his text by arguing, ?Äúthe administration at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America?Äôs will and resources to confront the expanded threat.?Äù Rich begins his work with an anecdote that invokes the memory of George Orwell and his prophecy that access to the truth would be the real casualty of the Cold War and whatever wars of political convenience might come in its wake. Rich refers to an account by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine about two weeks before the presidential election in 2004. Suskind wrote of his conversation with a senior aid to president Bush who ?Äúsounded uncannily like Carl Rove.?Äù The aid spoke with condescension about those few remaining journalists who belonged to what he called the ?Äúreality-based community.?Äù The aid concluded that a ?Äújudicious study of discernible reality?Äù is ?Äúnot the way the world works any more.?Äù What is important, therefore, is not truth, not ?Äúdiscernible reality.?Äù What is important, rather, is the picture of those imaginary realities created to serve the interests of power. ?ÄúWe?Äôre an empire now,?Äù indicated the informant, ?Äúand when we act, we create our own reality.?Äù The aid added, ?ÄúAnd while you?Äôre studying that reality?Äîjudiciously as you will?Äîwe?Äôll act again, creating other new realities.?Äù
Much of Rich?Äôs text is devoted to explaining in detail how the governments of Geoge Bush and Tony Blair transformed a war that began with the targeting of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda into a war directed at toppling and replacing the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. The key to this change in orientation was the implementation of a huge fraud conducted with the help and complicity of much of the commercial media. The essence of the fraud involved giving the appearance of reality to the lie that the regime of Saddam Hussein regime was on verge of manufacturing and deploying nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies. The revelations that the connections between Hussein, Al-Qaeda and WMDs were entirely fabricated to exploit the anger and patriotism aroused by 9/11 should have set off many alarm bells about the possibility of even bigger frauds being passed off as truth. The revelations should have aroused some determination to prove that the commercial media in North America still contains some journalists devoted to separating the lies of the powerful from ?Äúdiscernible reality,?Äù no matter how politically embarrassing or inopportune.
The need to revisit the official version of 9/11 constitutes the great test of whether or not many key elements of the commercial media can recover some measure of credibility after the WMD fiasco. The willingness to meet that need will determine if the commercial media can be viewed as anything other than a massive propaganda machine devoted to covering over the violence of an increasingly ruthless cabal of modern-day imperialists. If George Bush and his army of spin doctors in the White House, Pentagon, and commercial media could concoct the WMD fraud to justify the invasion of oil-rich Iraq, why could not this same cast of tellers of tall tales have misrepresented the events of 9/11 to serve the interests of their patrons and benefactors? The chorus of speculation rising up to meet the seemingly disingenuous claim that the effects of the direct hit on FOB Falcon are minimal represent only a tiny sample of the critical commentary generated on the internet as revelation after revelation cast growing doubt on the veracity of the Bush administration?Äôs self-serving version of what transpired in the lead up, execution, and aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The growing scepticism of many millions in the wired world about the US government?Äôs official explanation of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon have crystallized into a vast network of activists who have come to be known collectively as the 911 Truth Movement. The community of activism known as the 9/11 Truth Movement has eschewed the commercial media. Indeed, its leading protagonists tend to see the main organs of the commercial media as key agents in the thought-control department of the military-industrial complex and as knowing or inadvertent purveyors of a vast hoax aimed at ushering in a new form of totalitarianism. The main activists of the 911 Truth Movement have concentrated on the development of alternative venues on the internet to serve as vehicles where citizens can question freely the credibility of the officially-sanctioned conspiracy theory describing the identity, motivations, and actions of those portrayed by the Bush administration as the primal terrorists of the 9/11 attacks.
Many of the critiques of the government?Äôs version of the 9/11 conspiracy theory have been funneled into documentary videos available for downloading free through vehicles such as Google Video and You Tube. Currently Google Video presents a gateway to well over a hundred documentaries on 9/11. The vast majority of these productions offer interpretations which vary considerably from those provided by the Bush regime and the majority of commercial news outlets. Not surprisingly some of these videos are overzealous, poorly conceived, and amateurish in their execution. Others, however, are well produced and jammed with fact and allegation that, at the very least, point to the necessity of a new federal investigation that goes beyond the flawed work of the US government?Äôs Commission of Inquiry on the events of 9/11. I would count ?ÄúLoose Change?Äù and the videos of Canadian journalist Barry Zwicker as credible examples of the work of the more serious contingent of the 911 Truth Movement. In fairness MSNBC is one branch of the commercial media that has broken the pattern of merely recycling the usual clich?©s depicting a black and white struggle between good and evil in the War on Terror. Segments from Keith Olbermann?Äôs cable news show, ?ÄúCountdown,?Äù have been showing up as posts and in blogs of the 911 Truth Movement. Olbermann has referred to Rupert Murdoch?Äôs Fox News as ?Äúa propaganda company so blatent that Tokyo Rose would?Äôve quit.?Äù He has spoken of the Bush regime?Äôs practise of ?Äúbuying off journalists?Äù even as he chastised the Disney Company for its anti-Democratic Party partisanship in its production of ?ÄúThe Path to 911.?Äù On October 18 Olbermann interviewed a guest who described George Bush?Äôs Military Tribunal Act as the main marker of ?Äúa time of shame?Äù for the United States in its orientation to the global community. Olbermann?Äôs guest referred to the citizens of the United States as ?Äúconstitutional couch potatoes?Äù for allowing the Bush regime to overturn the basic principles of habeus corpus and to give the sanction of US law to the international crime of torturing so-called ?Äúunlawful enemy combatants?Äù in a unknown number of CIA-run ghost prisons around the world.
The 911 Truth Movement draws on the academic work of a number of established scholars. In the autumn of 2006 this growing network of academic researchers issued a publication on the frontiers of critical investigation into the apparent distance dividing the officially-sanctioned conspiracy theory and what the best available evidence tells us about the true content of 9/11. This publication is entitled 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out. Ten of the authors have PhD.s and nine are professors in well-regarded universities. One was a military officer at the Pentagon and one was employed by Underwriters Laboratories. Collectively their contributions cannot be easily dismissed. One of the editors is David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at Claremont Graduate University in California. Griffin?Äôs initial role was to develop a synthesis connecting the work of various critics of the officially-sanctioned 9/11 conspiracy theory. In The New Pearl Harbor published in 2004 Griffin tied together the published research of Nafeez Mossaddeq Ahmed, Paul Thompson, Michael Chossudovsky and Thierry Meyssan. Meyssan?Äôs L?ÄôEffroyable imposture, which highlights the absence of any wreckage of a 757 at the Pentagon, was a best seller in France. Its English-language translation has been published as 9/11: The Big Lie. In 2005 Griffin followed up his work on The New Pearl Harbor with a volume entitled The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. The co-editor of 9/11 and American Empire is Peter Dale Scott, a retired English professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Scott is the son of F.R. Scott, the former Dean of Montreal?Äôs McGill Law School who is fondly remembered in Canada as one of the country?Äôs most effective advocates of civil liberties. Peter Dale Scott worked as diplomat for the Canadian government. In his career as an academic Scott investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy as an example of what he calls ?Äúdeep politics.?Äù His more recent investigations have been directed at identifying the connections linking the US oil industry, the CIA, and illegal drug cartels. His own contribution to the volume is a five page article backed up by four pages of endnotes. From this base of detailed empirical proof Scott?Äôs short article documents Al-Qaeda?Äôs and the CIA?Äôs shared involvement in the production, refinement and distribution of illegal drugs.
The academic wing of the 911 Truth Movement highlights a number of theories that contradict the officially-sanctioned conspiracy theory. Much attention is devoted to the contention that the impact of the passenger jets could not have caused the collapse of the Twin Towers in the way that took place. Another major focus is the demolition of the third tower, WTC Building 7. Although that structure was not hit by a jet plane it fell in a very controlled manner in the late afternoon of September 11. Why did it fall? The great delay in the scrambling of US fighter jets once the hijackings were discovered has generated a large amount of commentary about how normal procedures were preempted by parties high up in the command structures of NORAD. The mysteries surrounding Flight 77 and its alleged ?Äúevaporation?Äù in the strike on the Pentagon has attracted much attention. The government?Äôs blockage of free access to a number of videos recording what really happened at the Pentagon is the basis for much conjecture that the truth of 9/11 is being actively suppressed. In 9/11 and American Empire Daniele Ganser, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Studies in Zurich, contends that there are only three scenarios that can explain the event that lies at the basis of the US government?Äôs so-called War on Terror. One of these scenarios is the one presently advanced by the Bush administration and most branches of the commercial media in North America. The second scenario Ganser identifies as LIHOP or Let It Happen on Purpose. Essentially Keith Olbermann has already asserted on his show on MSNBC that the Bush administration had all the information it needed to stop the 9/11 attacks but that it let the tragedy happen anyway. In commenting on this scenario Robert M. Bowman, a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and a former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the US Air Force alleges that such complicity would form the basis of charges of ?Äúhigh treason and conspiracy to commit murder.?Äù The third scenario Ganser labels as MIHOP or Make It Happen on Purpose. As Ganser writes, proponents of this thesis argue ?Äúthat criminal persons within the US government, in the Pentagon and the intelligence community?Äù caused the attacks to happen ?Äúin order to start a number of wars that had been planned in advance.?Äù As a proponent of this third thesis, Bowman argues that ?Äúall roads lead through [US Vice-President] Dick Cheney.?Äù
Many of the authors of the volume, 9/11 and American Empire, attempt to place the primal event justifying The War on Terror in the context of the history of the Cold War. The line of continuity linking the Cold War to the War on Terror hinges on the fact that since 1941 the political economy of the United States has consistently been centered on the development of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex. The end of the Cold War left the so-called national security apparatus of the United States without a ready rationale for its worldwide networks of puppet regimes, secret agents, weapons systems, naval operations, and military installations. In the course of the Cold War the leadership of both the universities and media conglomerates were recruited by the CIA and other federal agencies into the richly-funded contest to control public perceptions. The conduct of psychological warfare in the Cold war could sometimes involve so-called false-flag operations. In false-flag operations crimes are perpetrated by ruling regimes but attributed to the targeted enemies of those holding power. The aim is to turn public opinion against those who are wrongfully blamed for committing violent acts. Ganser?Äôs article outlines how false-flag operations were conducted in Italy by right-wing groups with the active and tacit support of government. The ultimate object of these lethal theatrics was to diminish the electoral appeal of the Italian Communist Party.
As Carl Bernstein revealed in 1977 in Rolling Stone in his ground-breaking investigation of ?Äúthe CIA and the Media,?Äù during the Cold War the federal government regularly manipulated the foreign and domestic press was to advance its anti-communist objectives. The CIA employed many hundreds of journalists to contribute to its agenda of psychological warfare against the real or imagined enemies of the American way of life. Among those recruited were the publisher of The New York Times and the chief executive officers of CBS and Time-Life Incorporated. The founder of Time-Life, Henry Luce, penned the original editorial in 1941 calling on the United States to dominate the rest of the planet in ?ÄúThe American Century.?Äù These same imperial principles informed the right-wing disciples of Professor Leo Strauss when they combined forces to set in motion the Project for a New American Century. The formulators of this project presently dominate the leadership of the War on Terror. In moving towards their objectives Paul Wolfowitz and others pointed to the need for some event equal in magnitude to the attack on Pearl Harbor in order to create the psychological environment in the United States necessary to undertake a US invasion of oil-rich Iraq.
It would be difficult to overstate the corrosive effects of institutionalized psychological warfare on the integrity and independence of both the commercial media and the academy in North America. The US-led side in the Cold War claimed a license to overthrow any government deemed inhospitable to the transnational operations of US businesses. Many of the corporate leviathans whose interests were advanced in this way played central roles themselves in the operation of the military-industrial complex. Indeed, as the Cold War unfolded it became increasingly clear that media conglomerates functioned as key agencies in the political and psychological operations of the military-industrial complex. In case after case of ?Äúregime change?Äù the leading members of the movement for decolonization were killed or ousted to make way for ruthless puppet regimes that often murdered and tortured dissidents who called for the nationalized control of indigenous natural resources. These illegal interventions in the sovereign authority of many states often involved the manipulation of journalists paid to point public attention away from the US role in backing ?Äúregime change?Äù or the subsequent international crimes of puppet regimes. Another task often handed to members of compliant press corps was to accompany false-flag operations with false-flag media stories disseminating disinformation to smear the reputations of those deemed unfriendly to the expansion of the laissez-faire empire of business headquartered in the trilateral domains of the United States, Japan and Western Europe.
The scale of the killing that took place in such episodes dwarfs the appalling death toll of 9/11. The push by the US and British governments to replace the Indonesian regime of Sukarno with that of Suharto in 1965, for instance, was accompanied by the cold-blooded murder of at least a half million victims in one of the twentieth century?Äôs most ruthless episodes of ideological cleansing.The US-backed overthrow in 1953 of Mohammed Mossedeq to make way for the Shah of Iran created cycles of oppression and violence that continue to cast long shadows over perceptions of the West throughout the Middle East. In Guatemala in the 1980s somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 Mayan Indians were exterminated by the government-backed death squads of President Rios Montt. From El Salvador to Haiti to Congo to Chile the same pattern of regime change, international crimes and media cover up has been repeated again and again. The disparity of response to 3,000 dead in New York or 200,000 dead in Guatemala is not lost on many millions who see the War on Terror as emblematic of the view that the murder of some types of human being constitutes a far greater crime than the murder of other types of human being. A cynic might go further, observing that the mass murder of those with predominantly fair complexions is almost invariably treated as a far more serious order of crime than the mass murder of those with predominantly dark complexions.
The major example where the US media broke away from its close collaboration with the global operations of the capitalism?Äôs military-industrial complex was in the coverage of the Cold War confrontation in Indochina in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In that particular instance the US media conglomerates allowed their reporters to depict the devastating effects of US militarism on the human condition of indigenous populations in Vietnam. The result was the gradual undermining of popular support for the US role in the war. The determination never again to allow the commercial media to play this kind of role was instrumental in bringing about many changes. The journalistic depiction of the shared humanity of the victims of US militarism in Vietnam would not be repeated in the coverage of the military assaults directed at the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in 1991, at Serbian Yugoslavia in 1999, and now at Iraq on the most extended frontiers of the War on Terror. Instead of close ups on the ground showing traumatized children fleeing bombed out shanties we have frequently been presented with birds?Äô eye views showing the allegedly ?Äúsurgical?Äù strikes of ?Äúsmart bombs?Äù where the mayhem inflicted on civilian populations is characterized in the dehumanizing language of ?Äúcollateral damage.?Äù We have been presented with imagery that often depicts the inferno of war as a glorified version of video games. The truncated quality of reportage emphasizing the perspectives of journalists ?Äúembedded?Äù in the military machinery of the War on Terror has come to epitomize the subordination of ?Äúdiscernible reality?Äù to realities manufactured for popular consumption in the service of power. In the course of this transformation the work of covering war has become so integrated with the work of waging war that an event of the magnitude of the weapons blasts at FOB Falcon can apparently be made to disappear almost into thin air. Only the wonders of the internet as presently constituted present a substantial check on expedients of wartime censorship and disinformation.
To understand the background of the manipulation of journalism in the War on Terror it is necessary to look attentively at the way the media was systematically controlled to serve the US-led side of the Cold War. The Cold War was used as a pretext to enable those on the capitalist side of the conflict to demonize and eliminate without trial or due process any individual, group, organization, or government deemed out of step with the military and commercial requirements of the informal US empire. The replacement of the Cold War with the War on Terror has created the justification for the continuation of the US political economy as a wartime economy from 1941 until the present day. While the enemies of the national security state may have shifted, what has remained the same throughout the transition is the assertion by the US executive branch of a global imperative to circumvent international law in order to intervene deeply and covertly into the internal affairs of virtually every country on earth. The manipulation of the imagery of communist or terrorist savagery is hardly surprising given that most of the architects and executives of the War on Terror initially served the US government as Cold Warriors. Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, for instance, learned the arts and science of governance as agents of anti-communism. Similarly Condoleezza Rice earned her Ph.D. as a Sovietologist. In his ascent towards the presidency George Bush senior, the father of the present US president, was director of the CIA, an agency founded when the United States replaced Nazi Germany as the primary shield against the worldwide spread of Soviet power and Marxist ideology.
While there are many continuities linking the Cold War and the War on Terror there are many disjunctures as well. One of the big changes is the existence, reach and growing effectiveness of the internet. In the era of the internet it has become more difficult than in the past to manipulate the understanding of the public, or at least that portion of the public who regularly surf the web to gather a range of information from varied sources on the unfolding of current affairs. Indeed, in this era when the War on Terror seems sometimes to be a War on Truth, there is probably no more strategic resource than the interactive capacities, but especially the search mechanisms, of the worldwide web.
As I argue in my own volume, The American Empire and the Fourth World, the politics and ideology of the War on Terror run far more deeply into the soil of US history than 1948 or 1945 or 1941. I see the real origins of the War on Terror in a concluding passage of the American Declaration of Independence, a document drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence was proclaimed on July 4, 1776 to announce to the world the nature of the political convictions animating those rebels seeking to break free from the authority of the British imperial government in North America. This most famous of all political manifestos begins with the timeless phrases asserting the equal right of all men to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The authors go on to present a detailed condemnation of King George III. Among his many alleged crimes the imperial sovereign is accused of ?Äúbringing on the merciless Indian savages whose known means of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.?Äù With this single phrase the founders of the United States effectively put all Indians outside the framework of the rule of law. Here was a primal example of racial profiling conveyed in a fashion that effectively criminalized the Indigenous peoples whose inherent right to possess and defend their Aboriginal lands represented the primary obstacle to the transcontinental expansion of the revolutionary polity.
The ?Äúunlawful enemy combatants?Äù referred to in the legislative machinery of the War on Terror are the new merciless Indian savages. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the growing network of CIA ghost prisons and black sites are the new frontier outposts of the never ending Indian wars of US expansionism. From Mexicans, to Aboriginal Hawaiians and Philippinos, from trade unionists to socialists to communists, from savage Indians to savage terrorists, the makers of the United States have always found ways to place those who seemingly stand in the way of their imperial ambitions outside the framework of universal law, liberty and human rights. In this sense the War on Terror recycles some of the oldest and most essential energies that have made the revolutionary republic and its informal empire such a dynamic yet dangerous force in the world.
Literary References
Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006)
Peter Dale Scott and David Ray Griffin, eds, 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2006)
David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2004)
David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005)
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked September 11, 2001 (Joshua Tree California:Tree of Life Publications, 2002)
Thierry Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie (London: Carnot, 2002)
Michael Chossudovsky, War and Globalisation: The Truth Behind September 11 (Ottawa: Global Outlook, 2002)
Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)
Anthony J. Hall, The American Empire and the Fourth World (Montreal: McGill-Queen?Äôs University Press, 2005)
Carl Bernstein, ?ÄúThe CIA and the Media,?Äù Rolling Stone, 20 October, 1977
Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communications Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New York: The New Press, 1998)
Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: Morrow and Company, 1987)
Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989)
